Dylan Farrow has come forward with details about her sexual abuse at the hands of her father Woody Allen. Her brother Ronan, has supported her. And now her brother Moses Farrow has come forward to defend Woody, accusing his mother Mia of “poisoning” the family against her former partner. Her motive, of course, is revenge against Woody--for seducing and marrying one of Mia’s daughters.

High drama, but also predictable. In cases of incest, it is very common for one or more siblings to refute the victim’s accusations and come to the defense of the perpetrator. This happened in the Sandusky case. One of his sons accused his father of abuse, but the other sons stood by their father.  The same thing happened with Roseanne Barr. Her sister contradicted Roseanne’s version of the abuse in the family.

And it happened in my own family. My brother’s position was that I had “falsely accused an innocent old man.” How is that siblings can have such wildly different experiences within the same family?  There could be several possible reasons:

Often the victim occupies a scapegoat role in the family, and discrediting and trashing him or her is part of the prevailing family dynamic. The abuser could be so powerful or terrifying that other siblings, for their own reasons, may have chosen to side with him or her… and sometimes that “choice” is made for them on a subconscious level, with the subconscious mind editing out of memories.  And then, there are the perks and incentives. Inheritance is always a big one, but there can be other benefits in protecting a perpetrator. Often accusing a family member will result in losing one’s welcome with the perpetrator’s side of the family, or even with the entire family. No more invitations to Thanksgiving, graduations, holiday dinners. If one is still being supported by family, it might mean no more free rent, no more free tuition, and so on. When the perpetrator is a famous celebrity, the benefits can be substantial.

But there can be something else going on when siblings deny abuse. It’s called dissociation. In psychiatry, this is defined as “the separation of normally related mental processes, resulting in one group [of processes] functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cases to disorders such as multiple personality.”

Let’s look at this.

Often a perpetrator will only perpetrate when they are in an altered state from drug or alcohol use. Under the influence, they can be described as “changing personalities,” “acting like a different person.” And sometimes, with sexual abuse, this can happen without substances. Sexual compulsions and addictions operate apart from the will. They seem to have a mind of their own. Ask any addict. This is what Step One of the Twelve Steps is all about: “Admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.” Folks in recovery will be quick to add that being “powerless over alcohol” does not mean they are helpless or non-accountable. The addict can reach out, get a sponsor, attend 12-step meetings. Addicts, even ones far-gone in addiction, can and do become clean and sober and stay that way. They can make amends.  But first they have to identify the disease as a dissociated state that can take over their thinking. Recovery strategizes around the dissociated process of addiction, which is why it works. It does not rely on will power.

Dissociation can be very confusing, and especially for children. Often the distance between “drunk daddy” and “sober daddy,” or between “perpetrating mommy” and “non-perpetrating mommy” can be so great that it is impossible for a child to hold the concepts of both simultaneously in the mind. They have to choose. The internal split of the perpetrator becomes an external fault line in the family. The child does what the perpetrator does: He or she edits out the inconsistencies, splitting off the affect and the narratives that are taboo. Sometimes the victims themselves can experience this before retrieval of memories. Incest survivor Marilyn Van Derbur writes about the “daytime daddy” and the “nighttime daddy,” and how there was no connection between them in her mind. As a child, she split off all her memories of “nighttime daddy,” and she did not recover these until she was an adult.

Trauma is trauma because it involves something that the mind cannot accept, and yet something that the mind must accept. Incest is traumatic. It cannot have happened, and yet it did. One cannot bear to think about it, and yet one must find a way to think about it. The family cannot assimilate it, and yet they must. Fissures open up. Lines are drawn. Alliances form. Something or someone is ejected. Someone is a liar, someone has ulterior motives. The survivor recants or she is cast out, discredited, trashed. Or else the perpetrator is rejected, demonized, banished, all traces exorcized.

My perpetrator had dissociative disorders. He could be in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight with my mother, with screaming and hitting… but if the doorbell rang, he would cross to the door, open it—cool as a cucumber—and make a little joke about his torn shirt and the missus. He could turn like that on a dime. As his mental illness progressed, he began to lose his boundaries among his colleagues. One attorney told me how she was in the middle of negotiating a divorce settlement. She was representing one partner, and my father was representing the other. Suddenly, in the middle of the negotiating, he stood up and began to preach how it was the will of God for the couple to reconcile. He delivered a sermon as if it was from the mouth of God. This from the man who abused his daughter!

Sometimes, when a powerful figure, like a father, dissociates, those around can also spontaneously dissociate on cue. That enables them to split off and possibly forget entire episodes of incongruent behavior. This kind of dissociation is a self-protective strategy, especially when the family is still a survival unit, as it is for a child.

How did the perpetrator learn to dissociate? Often perpetrators were victims themselves. They failed to reconcile the fission in their early psyches, which enabled a dissociated reality to grow in themselves. My father was sexually abused by his mother, who slept with him until he was twelve. He was sexually compulsive by the time he was a teenager… and yet, he tried to gain admission to seminary school. He wanted to be a minister!  How did he reconcile his out-of-control sexuality with a call to the ministry?

What I noticed was that my father could do something that the whole family witnessed, like cutting through the cord of an electric hedge-trimmer, and then insist that he had not done it. I mean, really insist. I thought, “Well, he’s either the world’s best actor or else he has the world’s worst memory.” I came to believe that the truth was neither. He was dissociating. He held himself to such high standards of godlike perfectionism, that when he messed up, he simply edited reality. He could “make it so” whenever he wanted. Possibly it was these impossibly high standards that played a part in the creation of a criminal and non-accountable dissociated state.

My father eventually became a criminal attorney, which was an ideal profession for a man with an aptitude for altering his reality. He could argue with remarkable persuasion the innocence of the most blatant offender, because in his mind, he had “made it so.”

I do not believe that my father assimilated his perpetrations. I believe that he stored those memories in the same file with the bisected hedge-trimmer cord: “Things That I Know I Could Not Possibly Have Done.”

Getting back to the question of siblings…

When these conflicting sibling narratives occur, they do not necessarily mean that the perpetration never happened. In fact, they can bear powerful witness to a dissociated truth about the family. Is someone lying? “Lying” is a poor choice of words for what happens in dissociation. Truth is being compartmentalized, split off, banished… but that is different from intentional lying.  These pieces of truth, held by different family members, become polarized, as do the holders of them. Demon-monster or long-suffering, wrongfully accused innocent?  Ungrateful, vengeful child or courageous truth-teller? Loyal sibling defending an innocent parent or cowardly betrayer hoping to inherit?

One of the touchstones of late stage recovery is the ability to move away from black-and-white thinking, to be able to hold in mind contradictory truths. What would this look like in the case of incest?

One might remember the times when a perpetrator was caring and generous, and at the same time hold the memories of their horrific perpetration and betrayal. One might acknowledge the skill or artistry in the perpetrator’s professional life, and still retain the anger for their sexual predation.  Holding contradictory truths, one must still make choices around behaviors. And those behaviors will reflect values and have moral consequences.

In my own experience, I was less empowered when I was demonizing the perpetrator. I continue to confront and I still hold him accountable, but today I have a deeper understanding of him as person made up of many parts, with his own history of victimization, and suffering from a devastating form of mental illness. This perspective expands my opportunities for advocacy and activism, and it also enables me to take a more careful inventory of the ways in which I have been affected by the perpetration.

Today, I can read the articles by Dylan and by Moses Farrow, and I can see how they both tell the same story, a story of incest.

I remember the bad old days when sexual harassment was teasing and date rape was just a bad date. I remember when rape was considered something that strangers did to careless women walking too close to dark alleys.

What changed? Many things. Women were allowed to vote, to own our children, to gain an education, to work in the professions, to inherit and own property, to serve on juries, to control reproduction. Women were able to become doctors and lawyers and elected officials and judges. We came out of isolation in patriarchal homes and roles. We started talking to each other, comparing our experiences.

But here’s the thing about children. There will never be a critical mass of empowered individual children. Children will never organize themselves into PACs. They will never control research about themselves. They will never elect their own officials to frame laws on their behalf. They will never serve on juries or be judges, or even become attorneys. They will never be the doctors examining other children. They will never be the psychologists questioning other children. Because they are children, they will always be dependent. Their rights will always be defined by and granted to them by adults. And rescinded. They will be treated as property of their parents, unless there is some kind of horrendous abuse that is brought to the attention of authorities.

Here’s another thing about children: They will always think like children. Their brains are still developing. They will have survival strategies that are functions of their helplessness and their stages of development. They can be trained so easily to believe atrocity is normal, that perpetrators are their protectors, because they do not have the prior points of reference of adult victims. Their silence can be coerced. They can believe that they are the cause of every abuse perpetrated on them, and that their perpetrators are their victims.

When a charge of sexual abuse is brought forward officially, it will always need to be an adult bringing it forward. There will always need to be adults eliciting, transcribing the story. And, as these adults attempt to bridge the language and perception barriers, they become vulnerable to charges of manipulating the child, implanting suggestions…  recruiting the child in an act of spite or revenge.

And then, of course, there is the narrative that a child constructs. The details may change. The chronology may double back on itself. The memory may be somatic, or emotional only. The more traumatic the incident, the more fragmented the narrative. Deprived of agency, the child does the only thing she can to alleviate the agony of powerlessness: She changes her thinking. There may be dissociation, amnesia, aphasia, confusion, contradiction, fusion with the perpetrator, overwhelm. And every one of these syndromes, modes of thinking, and disjointed styles of narration becomes justification for discrediting the child.

This is the situation with incest. This is why children are targeted. They won’t tell, and if they do, they won’t be believed, and if they are, it still can’t be proven. And nearly always there is more social capital in siding with the perpetrator who is, after all, an adult. Children have few resources, few networking connections of any use to adults. And their anger cannot result in slander, evictions, firing, scapegoating, and social shunning. Siding with the perpetrator nearly always carries fewer negative consequences for the bystander.

And, then, of course, there is the media circus around an incest accusation. The ordeal that the child will have to survive.  Many parents and sometimes prosecuting attorneys make the decision not to press charges. This is especially true when the perpetrator is a celebrity or public figure. And when charges are dropped, the world takes that as proof that it was all made up in the first place.

If the perpetrator is careful not to leave any physical evidence, he or she can pretty much count on indemnity.

If there were or could be such a thing as a court of children, there might be different standards. The shattered narratives might be read differently by a true jury of peers. The amnesia or chronological inconsistencies themselves might be assessed as an index of the severity of trauma, instead of evidence of "false memory."  A jury of child peers might react very differently to a celebrity defendent, unswayed by the celebrity's social position or reputation. They might have a visceral response to the creep factor. (And, yes, adult juries are influenced by emotional factors all the time.)

But this kind of justice is not possible for children. We adults must always interpret, intercede, mediate, judge, indict, sentence.  And we are doing a terrible job.

Oscar Wilde was not a stupid man. He was highly educated, and, as a playwright, was considered brilliant. So here was something that always bothered me about that notorious trial for gross indecency:

His friends and attorney advised him to flee the country. If he stayed in England he was unquestionably going to be found guilty and sentenced to prison... most likely to hard labor.  His own flippant testimony in the earlier libel case, as well as the testimony of several of the "rent boys" whose sexual services he had purchased, were going to seal the deal. The magistrate, somewhat sympathetic to his situation, made a point of delaying issuing the warrant for his arrest until 5PM, specifically to allow Wilde to catch what they called the "train boat" to France. His wife urged him to go. His friends, seeing which way the wind was blowing, all departed for the Continent.

But Wilde didn't go. He waited for them to come and arrest him.

Why? Later he would say that he could not face the status of being haunted and hunted... and that he actually believed that he could be acquitted.

Insane denial? Magical thinking? Or was there something in his past that encouraged him in his belief about immunity?

Reading about Wilde's father, I thought I might have a found a key to solving the mystery. His father, William R. Wilde, was a celebrated Irish eye and ear surgeon, who was eventually knighted. The scandals surrounding his life appeared not to have disturbed his reputation. He had three children out-of-wedlock before marrying Oscar's mother.

Then, in 1864, Mary Travers, daughter of a Trinity professor, accused him of having drugged her with chloroform and raping her. Sir William did not appear in court, and the jury took this as an admission of guilt, but the sentence they handed down was an insult to plaintiff. They awarded her one farthing in damages... apparently the valuation in their eyes of her physical integrity. His refusal to testify was considered shameful, and it is interesting to note that the sole voice urging Oscar not to take the train boat was that of his mother. (In fairness, she did ask him if he was innocent, and he insisted that he was. Her response was that he must stay. Oscar had also been unequivocal about disavowing his homosexuality when he retained the services of his attorney... severely compromising the reputation of a man who had been a friend as well as a colleague.)

But getting back to Sir William Wilde... He had been involved in medical controversies around the interpretation of child rape, especially the rape of little girls. He maintained that the real danger was that of innocent persons being falsely charged with perpetration. His position was that the epidemic of "infantile leucorrhoea" (inflammation and infection of the genitals, somtimes leading to death) was no more than an issue of poor hygiene on the part of the little girls.

Most infamously, he offered an appeal in the case of Amos Greenwood, who had been found guilty of manslaughter in the case of a nine-year-old girl that he had raped and who had died from syphilis. Neither the defendant nor the defendant's friends argued for his innocence, but Sir Wilde attempted, unsuccessfully,  to recruit twelve of his colleagues in maintaining that the girl had died of poor hygiene.

Later, when his coachman was accused of raping and infecting two girls, Wilde came to his defense, and, late in the proceedings,  his wife, Lady Wilde came up with an alibi for the coachman. The coachman admitted to his habit of inviting little girls up into the hay loft of his barn to look at kittens...  Later, Sir Wilde also came to the defense of a businessman and a railway clerk accused of raping girls.

This was the father of Oscar Wilde. These were the causes and scandals that informed his childhood. What would be the lessons? That a man can be promiscuous and a sexual predator, and still become a knight of the realm. That, even found guilty of drugging and raping a colleague's daughter, the penalty will be a farthing. That children are not sexually abused, but that their genital infections are their own fault and the true victims are the innocent folks scapegoated by them and by their parents.

In "De Profundis," a lengthy and self-serving letter that Wilde wrote from prison, he described the prostituted children he and his lover would acquire:

"People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But then, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approach them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers ; the danger was half the excitement. I used to feel as a snake- charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth or reed basket that holds it and makes it spread its hood at his bidding and sway to and fro in the air as a plant sways restfully in a stream. They were to me the brightest of gilded snakes, their poison was part of their perfection."

"Evil things of life?" Not even human. Panthers or cobras. And, he, Wilde, is their victim.

In light of Sir William's denial about sexually transmitted diseases, it is interesting to note that his son had not had sexual relations with his wife for several years. The reason he had given was that his syphilis, which he had contracted from a prostitute during his student years and had believed to be cured, was, in fact, still virulent. There is no evidence that Oscar ever shared this information with any of the boys with whom he had sexual relations.

We can never know why Wilde did not take the train boat to France when he had the chance, but it does not seem unreasonable that his choices may have been influenced by the values of Sir William Wilde.

In a personal footnote, as an activist against child sexual abuse and as an advocate of victims of pedophilia and incest, I am always disturbed when Wilde is put forward as an LGBT icon. He was no "out and proud" activist. He repudiated his homosexuality in the courtroom, as well as in "De Profundis," where he referred to it as a form of "erotomania," and one of the "most disgusting passions."  He was not sentenced to prison for an egalitarian, intimate partnership with Lord Alfred. It was his sexual predation toward underaged boys that indicted him. He never took responsibility for his actions, and upon his release from prison he resumed his sexual predation, traveling with Lord Alfred to Algiers for the express purpose of buying boys on the cheap... boys who could never be called upon in British court to testify against him.

“Trust children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children, we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”

These are the words of educational pioneer John Holt. They came to my mind when I sat down to write a review of Christine Stark’s ambitious first novel, Nickels.

Nickels is the story, told in a first-person narrative, of a survivor of paternal incest and maternal abandonment. The chapters are named for the age of the protagonist, and they advance in five year increments, beginning when “Little Miss So and So” is five and ending when she is twenty-five. Although Stark makes clear in her introduction that the story is not autobiographical, the authenticity of the heroine’s voices at these various ages and stages of development indicates—at least to this reader—that Stark has remarkable recall for the voices of childhood.

This is no small feat. Early childhood is a landscape of disconnected perceptions, whose causal links and contexts are not yet understood by the developing brain. It is a world of limited language and limited concepts… or perhaps the better word would be “restricted,” because the child must make sense of her world using templates handed to her and imposed upon her by the adult world. Childhood is a paradox. For all the confusion and intentional obfuscation, children manifest astounding clarity about the beauties of the natural world as well as the hypocrisies of the adult one. Sadly, most of us lose both the sense of wonder and of horror as we mature. It goes without saying—literally—that the child’s perspective is a challenge for most writers. When the child is a survivor, it becomes nearly impossible to retrieve that voice, because of the dissociation, amnesia, and denial associated with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder  (PTSD), which is the legacy of child sexual abuse.

Stark has done something in Nickels that deserves our attention. She has not only remembered, but she has resisted the impulse to editorialize. Instead, she has given us the pure voice of the survivor, and in doing that, she compels her readers to experience the world—fragmented, distorted, with fragile islands of comfort and familiarity—through the eyes and limited context of the child. And then she enables us to grow up along with that survivor, collecting and integrating the fragments of self along with her protagonist.

Thank you, Ms. Stark, for what must have been a descent into some kind of personal hell to recover this fictional Eurydice , this survivor with no name, whom you have led back up into the light of publication—an indictment and a torchbearer.

Forgetting childhood sometimes appears to be the primary goal of socialization, even as civilization promulgates evermore clever incentives for amnesia and evermore diabolical penalties for remembering.

Nickels is a tough read, like other novels about incest (Push by Sapphire, which was made into the film Precious, or The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.) Historically, the culture has preferred perpetrator-identfied or apologist books like Lolita, depicting the survivor of child sexual abuse as a sexually precocious predator, or a shadowy figure around which the rest of the plot revolves. The trope of the survivor of incest in a father-knows-best world, like the 19th century trope of the “tragic octaroon” in a world of racial apartheid, is that of a lamentable anomaly in a system that otherwise works just fine for everybody. The incest survivor is a reminder of inconvenient truths, and writers and artists historically either pretend she does not exist or they—regretfully—kill her off (suicide, of course, being a form of death by remote control).

Stark does neither. Her protagonist survives. She comes to an understanding of what has been done to her, and as importantly, by whom it has been done. She has been victimized by her father and her mother, by a criminal justice system that fails her, by misguided social workers and foster parents, by mental health professionals and institutions. But she finds a community. She finds feminism. She recognizes her own lesbianism, a lesbianism that enabled her to form a powerful and passionate alliance with another girl at the age of ten. She begins to write and she finds her voice.

I want to give an example of Stark’s brilliant stream-of-consciousness, literary and spot-on accurate portrayal of PTSD. This is an excerpt from the chapter titled “Age Twenty-five.” A little backstory: When the heroine was ten her father made her wear a purse, where he would put the nickels he gave her after sexually abusing her. Now, she is in a women’s bookstore attempting to purchase a feminist novel:

"Sarah rings me up That’ll be 1.95 with tax I give her two dollars five cents is your change she drops a nickel so shiny and bright into my hand I freeze the nickel rolls off my hand onto the counter I stare at it I want to tell someone something the nickel circles itself on the counter looking for a place to settle I don’t move What’s going on Tara says somewhere over my shoulder I stare at the nickel spinning in a spot next to the pile of bright pink A Room of One’s Own bookmarks I shake my head I don’t want them to think I’m crazy don’t want them to know a nickel dropped out of the sky into my hand made me want to die Keep the change I grab the book walk under the shimmering crystal into the street"

This is how it happens, integration of trauma: moment-by-moment, association-by-association, synaptic-connection-by-synaptic-connection, by constant negotiation between past and present, telling and not-telling, depairing and hoping, heaven and hell.

Thank you, Christine, for the gift.

(Nickels (ISBN: 978-1615990856) is available at bookstores, online booksellers, and can also be purchased as a Kindle download. For information about Stark and her other work, visit her website.

It's too late for a women's party. That was the great dream of some of our Suffrage foremothers-- that after women got the vote we would organize ourselves into a separate political party that would seriously rearrange the business-as-usual agenda. Opponents of Suffrage, for all the rhetoric about "a woman's place" and protecting our pure minds from the dirty work of politics, were terrified that this would be the outcome. Frankly, I think it's sad that a women's party did not emerge. In the ninety-one years since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, there have been a few "gender gaps" in the poll numbers between the Democrats and the Republicans, but the Equal Rights Amendment never passed, we are still needing to fight for our reproductive rights,  the majority of folks living in poverty in the US are women and children, and violence against us continues to rise. Women adn children comprise 80% of the casualties in war these days...  up 400% since the days of Suffrage. Needless to say, we are wildly underrepresented in Congress.

And it's too late for that women's party now. The evil is too big, too pervasive.  What we need is something more radical. Something like a children's party.  Political, that is.

Children are the most globally disenfranchised, helpless, dependent, and historically victimized population on the planet. They are raped, beaten, trafficked, starved, forced into slave labor, held as captives, tortured, pimped out in marriages, and forced to give birth... with near impunity. Their abuse is legal in many situations. They are colonized by adults everywhere

Children, as an exploited and colonized population are in a unique situation. They have never had a voice politically, and they never will. Why? Because they don't earn wages and those who are fortunate enough to have money in their name will have no control over that money until they become adults. In other words, they lack leverage; they have no clout. Oh, and they're children. Their brains are still developing. They are naive about the world, they lack language skills. The conditions for their ongoing exploitation are near ideal: They are ubiquitous, financially dependent, easy to discredit because of their youth, without representation, unable to organize themselves, naive and gullible, physically diminutive and relatively frail, and treated as the property of adults.

Children can't even organize a protest. How could they be expected to organize a national political party? Well, they can't. But adults, acting as proxies, could.

And, of course, this immediately calls to mind the absolutely abysmal historical record of adults attempting to protect children via legislation and agencies. How would this be any different?

Because it would be visionary. It would not be about advocacy and lobbying of existing adultist institutions. It would be a political party that prioritized the needs of children, not as planks in a platform, but as the sole agenda.

And what are those needs?

• The right to their bodily integrity. (no corporal punishment, trafficking, prostitution, exploitation in pornography, rape, molestation)
• The right to their childhood. (no slave labor)
• The right to clean air and clean water.
• The right to education.
• The right to safe homes.
• The right to a radiation-free, pollution-free environment.
• The right to access nature.
• The right to health, dental, and optical care.
• The right to spiritual autonomy. (no indoctrination)
• The right to food that is pesticide-free and not genetically-modified.
• The right to a future.
  

I read this week that the Japanese government will be issuing radiation-monitoring badges to 34,000 children in northern Japan.  This is in lieu of evacuation and will take three radiation-accumulating months to accomplish.

This year, there have been a spate of lawsuits filed in several states and in federal court by an Oregon-based nonprofit called Our Children's Trust. The lawsuits, filed on behalf of children and young adults,  are based on "common law" theories about "public trusts." The goal is to have the atmosphere declared for the first time as a public trust, warranting government protection.  In the past, this "public trust" concept has been effectively used to clean up polluted rivers and coastlines. Applying it to global warming and climate change may be somewhat trickier. The organization uses the phrase "intergenerational justice."

And... child trafficking. This is one of the fastest growing crimes in the world. Trafficking is the world’s second largest criminal enterprise, after drugs. The global market of child trafficking at over $12 billion a year with over 1.2 million child victims. Baby-farming, pornography, child brides, child soldiers... 

A children's party. An act of penance on the part of all of us adults. A children's party NOW.